A Child's Christmas

This Friday poem is prose!  And I make no apology for this seasonal offering, extracts from Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales.  Thomas's prose is so poetic that I feel justified in using this favourite of mine; he is a man on whose words you can really get drunk - and to hear him read his own poetry is a revelation - there are recordings still available, notably a BBC compilation.  This lovely story, which you can get illustrated by Ardizzone, tells of a composite childhood Christmas in his native South Wales, and is full of gorgeous language, wonderfully funny incidents, and a childlike mystery which captures even my hard heart.  Don't just read this, wrap yourself in it, shout it aloud, and have a very happy Christmas!

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out comes...

...Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?"
"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."
"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"
"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."
"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."
"There were church bells, too."
"Inside them?"
"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

If you can't wait until you can get to a bookshop, you can read the whole thing here.

Comments

[Peter the flautist]

Don't praise the cat too much or he will become insufferable! Happy Christmas to all.

Dark Puss

[Cornflower]

You've reminded me of how much I used to love Dylan Thomas and how I ought to revisit him. Perhaps that's my first New Year resolution!

[glo]

How sweet is that! My heart is melting...

A happy Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, to the lovely Dark Puss and to everybody reading this.